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Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users
OpenAI reinstated a 5-hour usage limit for Plus and Business Standard subscribers, sparking Hacker News debate about subsidized inference pricing and subscription value.
A Hacker News discussion reports that OpenAI has brought back a 5-hour usage limit for Plus and Business Standard users. Commenters debated whether cheap tokens are a subsidized customer acquisition strategy, whether AI companies have sustainable margins on inference, and how switching costs between providers affect dependency. The thread reflects community sentiment on pricing and usage caps rather than an official policy announcement.
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Not everyone is convinced that Big AI's proposed development slowdown is really about safety
Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and others blast OpenAI, Anthropic and Google's proposed frontier AI slowdown as anticompetitive 'cartel by another name.'
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for industry and government coordination to slow frontier AI development, requesting antitrust exemptions, with backing from Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez called the proposal a cartel designed to lock in barriers like massive compute and permanent monitoring, while Hugging Face's Niels Rogge and White House AI czar David Sacks also pushed back. Trump labeled AI takeover warnings a hoax, and China rejected the slowdown plans as a US ploy.
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Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data
Mecka AI, which collects human motion data for robot training, is nearing a Sequoia-led round at about a $500 million valuation.
Mecka AI is nearing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of roughly $500 million, three months after raising $60 million led by Framework Ventures with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures. Founded in 2024 by Josh Gao, Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong, and Duy Nguyen, the startup pays people to record everyday tasks using body sensors and smartphones to produce egocentric training data for humanoid robots. The company projected a $100 million annual run rate by the end of 2026 and competes with firms like Scale AI, Mercor, Surge, Micro1, and XDOF in the physical-world data market.
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Meta says it’s changing AI suggestions after posing invasive personal questions
Meta is fixing Meta AI suggested prompts after a viral video showed the chatbot compiling invasive questions about a user's children from her Facebook posts.
Meta said it 'missed the mark' and has fixed the issue after Instagram user Kalie Robins showed Meta AI suggesting 'Who is the child passenger?' beneath a video with her child and then piecing together details about her daughters from her and relatives' posts. The assistant also surfaced photos of her children, including one the user claims she deleted years ago. Meta AI is embedded in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger; in July the company pulled an Instagram user-deepfake feature after backlash.
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Universal Music is launching an AI music platform with ElevenLabs
Universal Music Group partners with ElevenLabs on a licensed AI music platform enabling fan-made remixes, with artists opting in.
Universal Music Group announced a multi-year licensing agreement with ElevenLabs to build an AI platform letting users create remixes, mashups, and new takes from UMG's licensed catalog. Artists can choose whether to participate, and the companies promise fair compensation; the platform will remain separate from ElevenLabs' Music API and ElevenMusic generator. UMG already runs an AI music project with Udio and has licensing deals with Spotify, Nvidia, and Klay.
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Apple’s new iPhone camera mode promises to prove your photo isn’t AI
Apple's iPhone 18 Pro adds a Reference Image mode that cryptographically signs camera sensor pixels to prove photos were not AI-generated or edited.
Apple will launch a Reference Image mode with the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, using the new camera sensor to sign every pixel and develop the signed data via Private Cloud Compute into an unalterable reference image viewable in Photos. Users can compare the reference image against edited versions to verify authenticity, building on provenance standards like SynthID, C2PA, and Meta's Content Seal. A Reference Image API will span iOS, iPadOS, and macOS for third-party apps, though the feature launches without EU support, arriving there in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.
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Amazon Prime Video’s new AI tech matches lips to dubbed audio
Amazon Prime Video launched AI lip-sync dubbing aligning actors' mouth movements with human-dubbed audio, starting with the English dub of Maxton Hall.
Prime Video's new feature combines AI and visual effects technologies to make lip movements match translated speech, currently available for seasons 1-2 of the German series Maxton Hall worldwide and planned for additional titles, with season 3 arriving December 9. Amazon previously piloted AI-aided dubbing in English and Spanish across 12 movies and shows last year. Meta and YouTube have recently launched similar AI auto-dubbing features with optional lip sync for creators.
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Crusoe reportedly raises $3B at a $30B valuation
AI data center developer Crusoe raised $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation, plus a $13 billion five-year GPU contract with Jane Street.
Crusoe, which builds hyperscale data centers for customers including Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle, raised a $3 billion round at a $30 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. The round was co-led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners with participation from Mubadala Capital. It comes 10 months after a $1.38 billion raise at a $10 billion valuation and follows a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract supplying GPUs and AI infrastructure to trading firm Jane Street. The company has met with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley about a potential near-term IPO.
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